I am new to being a rat owner, I have 2 13 week old boys and they now have settled in and are used to the new home. I have been looking around and I see loads of owners letting their rats run free around the room. Mine love climbing on my shoulders and they are trained with that.

My problem is my room (which is my bedroom, my mother would not allow me to let them free anywhere else in the house) has nooks and crannies where they can hide into and there are the odd wires, I let them roam around my double bed but if they want to venture around somewhere else I start to get nervous. Should I just let them investigate the whole room a couple of times so they see everything or build a pen where they can run around in that?

Rats are driven to explore, but not to escape, so they will come back, just in their own time, which can be a problem. Also, if you are worried at all, they will pick up on that and perhaps become nervous themselves, so it is best to adapt the room.

Nooks and crannies are fine, so long as you don't mean holes in floorboards. The wires are a problem though - you could either get some protective conduit or tubing for the wires to go through, or block off the parts of the room where they are.

I used to have a makeshift set of panels- large, light mdf boards hinged together with brackets from B&Q I had a few of them in rows of two or three and used them to make a sort of cordon so they couldn't get into the cracks. You could also hinge a few together and make a large pen around you. The stuff was super cheap and I put it together myself, and because they were hinged, they folded away neatly

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